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From cultural diversity to cultural pluralism

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In our increasingly diverse societies, it is essential to ensure harmonious interaction among people and groups with plural, varied and dynamic cultural identities as well as their willingness to live together.

Policies for the inclusion and participation of all citizens are guarantees of social cohesion, the vitality of civil society and peace. Thus defined, cultural pluralism gives policy expression to the reality of cultural diversity.

Indissociable from a democratic framework, cultural pluralism is conducive to cultural exchange and to the flourishing of creative capacities that sustain public life.

Lourdes Arizpe - Bio

Lourdes Arizpe, from Mexico, is a professor of anthropology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a researcher at the Regional Centre for Multidisciplinary Research. She was a member of the World Commission on Culture and Development until she was appointed UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture in July 1994. In that capacity, she directed the first two UNESCO World Culture Reports in 1998 and 2000. She is an honorary doctor of numerous foreign universities.

The outworn metaphor of the ‘mosaic of cultures’ or the ‘global cultural mosaic’ no longer describes different peoples’ cultural preferences as they enter the world of the twenty-first century. Cultures are no longer the fixed, bounded, crystallized containers they were formerly reputed to be. Instead they are transboundary creations exchanged throughout the world via the media and the Internet. We must now regard culture as a process rather than as a finished product.

If cultural diversity is an irrepressible manifestation of the inventiveness of the human spirit, the creation of difference is equally inexorable. Yet the manner in which such difference is defined and acted upon by governments and social custom determines whether it is to lead to greater overall social creativity or else to violence and exclusion.

We argue that the acknowledgement, approval and even celebration of diversity, while it does not imply relativism, does imply pluralism. Cultural pluralism here refers to the way in which different nation-states, civil groups and national and international institutions understand and organize cultural diversity. No policy prescription can be readymade in this respect; such an exploration has to be made in terms of the culturally-diverse histories of all countries.

Cultural pluralism means granting cultural groups the right to diversity in the public sphere, and this may involve separating the question of the loyalty and attachment of people living in the same national territory from that of their rights as citizens.